


Family Portraits

by dynamicsymmetry



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Corvojess, Dishonored: The Brigmore Witches, F/F, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Low Chaos Daud (Dishonored), Magic, Medium Chaos (Dishonored), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-21
Updated: 2019-01-23
Packaged: 2019-10-14 04:35:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17501669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: Glimpses through their eyes.A collection of vignettes from the POV of various characters, locations, and inanimate objects, accompanied by imagery.





	1. this will be my last confession (Jessamine/The Heart)

**Author's Note:**

> I started making moodboards and of course I couldn't stop there. I have a set number planned, but it's possible that more will pop up, so we'll see. The number of chapters is an "at least this many" figure. 
> 
> Thanks so much for reading, and I always love to know what you think. ❤️

 

 

She's learning his hands in a whole new way now.

She thought she knew them so well. She does possess memories of when this heart that is all of her was merely a part of her, a resident in her chest, and her body was so much more, and she remembers how his hands felt on that body, how strong, how gentle, how careful when she wanted him to be and how rough when she wanted that too. She recalls with piercing clarity how it felt the first time she slipped her hand into his, the slight shock in him relayed by the sudden stiffness in his fingers, the way that stiffness melted into a kind of softness she'd never suspected he might be capable of.

She was young. So was he. She wasn't the Empress, not even seventeen, and she didn't know what was to come, didn't yet love him the way she would, but she did know how fundamentally _right_ it felt, her hand in his, the way he made her feel small without feeling weak, the way that one touch seemed to spread through the rest of her and she felt completely safe from all harm.

He was her Protector. She never doubted it. But that was the first moment she truly believed.

She doesn't remember why she held his hand. She doesn't remember the exact day, whether they were inside Dunwall Tower or out on the grounds or elsewhere, whether it was sunny or overcast or raining, morning or afternoon or slow evening. What she remembers is his hand.

Oh, it didn't take long after that for her to replace her hand with her heart, but even then she never could have guessed. She never could have imagined.

This. This ending that refuses to end.

He's still gentle with her. Nestled in a fold of his coat, pressed against his chest, and she listens to the thud of his own heart and imagines it reaching for her through the cage of his ribs. It's horrible. He carries her through the night, through the soot and the smoke, the stench of rotting flesh and blood, of disease, death, open sewers, oil and gunpowder—screams and moans have a smell. She never knew. She has no nose, so how can she smell anything? But she does. Every sense, she retains.

He retrieves her and his gentle hand turns rough as he squeezes the secrets out of her, and she licks the cracked lips she no longer has.

That roughness. The squeeze. His hand on her breast that first night, the storm outside—not raging but relentless, the endless downpour, the streets gone to rivers, the rats and stray cats drowning. She was wet from the rain, hair come loose and plastered to her face. His bare skin was slick against hers. She hissed _yes_ in his ear and arched and he touched her everywhere and muffled her cries with his mouth.

His teasing fingers. The friction of his callouses. Tangling in her hair and tugging until her nerves sparkled. He was good to her with those hands. He was so good then and every night after.

Other things. The almost delicate way he held his cigars, then casual on crystal tumblers honey-gold with whiskey. Attentively maneuvering a pen. Gripping his sword, his pistol, fighting with both at the same time, practicing in the yard with the latter unloaded. That delicacy was there too. More than that. Affection. He held his weapons like he loved them, and watching him test himself against volunteers from among the guards, whirling and parrying and feinting with all the easy grace of a dancer, her heart— _her heart, her heart_ —raced and heat flooded into her lower belly.

How many times after one of those sessions she summoned him to her bedroom and at her laughing command his hands played her like an instrument, made her sing.

He sucked her taste from his fingers. She whispered secrets to him. Now and then she had dreams, dreams that seemed too vivid to be only her mind’s idle babbling, dreams that felt like oncoming and inevitable truths, and though these alarmed her she never told him about them, but he soothed her with his low voice and even more with his hands when she broke the surface of sleep and jolted awake, and that he saw her that way felt like a secret in and of itself. She let him see.

Opening to him. Letting go.

His hand covering his mouth when he was finally allowed into her room after her hours of labor were over, stood in the doorway and stared at her and at the baby tucked against her breast and sleepily nursing; it was as if he was trying to muffle a cry and she didn't miss the tears shining in his eyes and then on his cheeks. The way he trembled when he reached out to touch Emily’s tiny head, fingertips feather-light over the softness of fontanelle.

When she was older, when he was, when all of them were, walking with Emily between them, her holding onto them and swinging back and forth, her musical giggles.

When the plague first began to ravage the city, when things first began to get truly bad: pulling his lover into his arms and stroking her hair, murmuring to her that everything would be all right in the end. That she was smart and capable. That her heart was true. That she would find a way.

_When you are near, my heart is at peace._

A brilliant flash of pain. The marble paving rising up to meet her with both astonishing speed and bizarre, dreamlike slowness. The feeling of everything flowing out of her, draining through her chest and gut. The world fading. His face, fading. His stricken, horrified eyes—sinking away from them. The way he clutched her as if he could keep her in her body by sheer force of will.

Darkness. Then more than darkness. Black eyes. Grinding gears. A glass window, round like a ship’s portal. Beating frantically against the walls of her own mutilated flesh. Wanting to scream with a voice strangled into a harsh whisper. Bones, singing.

And his hands again, when she was placed there.

She has other memories—the tight gray bun that her first governess styled her hair into; the thin sunlight through her childhood bedroom window; Delilah’s weeping; her father’s cool, stern eyes; the spicy fullness of cigar smoke in her nose; the rigid angle of her throne against her spine; the barely concealed contempt on the face of Waverly Boyle; the glimmer of chandeliers over the spinning forms at a royal ball; her terror at her coronation and her even greater terror that someone would spot it—but they're broken, the scattered, chaotic fragments of a shattered mirror. Her world is _him_ now.

It's a such an awful struggle.

Because she sees. She sees so much more than he does. She senses the world beyond him, so far away but there nonetheless, and she feels it teetering on the brink. She feels his hands tipping it first one way and then the other. She’s filled with the hot thrum of his bloodlust, his rage. She's shaken by the quiver in him as over and over he wrestles it back, and she’s frozen by his fear of failure. She's dizzy with his own memories. She doesn't know how one can bear to know someone so well. She never could have believed there was so much darkness in him. She wants to cry over it. She has no tears. There is no blood inside her. She's twisted metal and glass and dry, rubbery muscle.

She tried all her life to be good. She knows she wasn't always successful but she did try, so hard. She never thought much of the Strictures but she tried to do well as far as her own understanding went, or at the very least she tried to keep from doing harm, and she's consumed with the certainty that she's being _punished_ for something, and she doesn't know what.

Maybe for loving him. Maybe that was a curse. Because now he's condemned to this and she doesn't see any way he ever escapes it, even if this doesn't end in ruin; he’ll never heal from it. He’ll never get back what he lost. He’ll never be who he was.

But what about _her?_ What about what _she_ lost? What about _her_ suffering? What about _her_ curse? She’ll never see her own daughter grow up, she can't see past this pain, and for what? What did either of them know? By the Void, by the Outsider who damned her, _we were only children, we did the best we could._

 _I did the best I could, I DON’T DESERVE THIS._

Sometimes she hates him. Sometimes she hates them both.

 _End it. End it and let me go._

But he holds her with those tortuous hands. Sitting on the riverbank, perched on a pile of crumbled brick like a brooding crow, the death’s head mask discarded beside him, he holds her close to him and shivers. The sun is going down over the water, gray and utterly devoid of warmth. He used to sit with her in the evenings and watch the twilight creep over the city, whiskey a hot little coal in both their chests, fingers woven together. They never needed to speak in those moments. She had very few secrets left to tell him, though she kept some for herself and she’ll keep them even now. This is all wrong, nothing about it can ever be right, but he cradles her in his palms and she surrenders to it.

She wanted more. She _had_ more. This is paltry.

It's all she has left.


	2. pockets full of stones (the Brigmore Witches)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because I love Daud but these ladies deserve a story that isn't told through him.

 

Daud leaves them to pick up the pieces.

Some of them are dead. Some of them aren't. More alive than dead; they don't know what to make of that. Why in the Void would a killer not kill? They sit in the ruins of the ruins and hold this fact in their hands and turn it over and over, examining this new reality as they might any oddity—a charm, a human skull carved with thrumming runes, a rose that speaks with a child’s voice, a loaf of bread made with blood instead of water, a flask of luminous whale oil that sings the leviathan’s song. That they've been so attacked and so beaten and yet not all of them are dead.

Incredible. Quite literally a thing they can't credit.

Some of them wish they were.

~

We danced so, we reeled under the moon and capered like the Outsider’s demons, we laughed and drowned ourselves in wine and we were free as any wild bird. _Do you remember, sister?_ Do you remember how it was? Under a swollen golden moon in the Month of Harvest I pulled you close, touched your lips with mine and laid you down in a bed of dawnflowers and we danced all night long. We spat on the name of the High Overseer and we hexed the name of the Overseer who bound you and beat you when he found you in your father’s garden with that lovely girl in your arms. He beat you until you denounced your sinful lusts, cursed the dark creature who made you a whore. What could that sick bastard do to you then, when I lay between your thighs and tasted your delights? My sister, my love, you remember, don't you, that I promised we would feed him his own skin bite by bite and exult in our wanton flesh before his very eyes.

She would have given us that. She promised us all our delicious vengeance and we went to her and it was joy.

What can we do now? The coldest part of the Void has broken into the world in the shape of her. I hold you in the dark, in the bed we shared all these weeks of paradise, and I stroke your hair and I whisper my pitiful little promises, which I don't ever expect to be able to keep. But I would try for you. I would be the one who never failed you, if only I could. If only I was strong enough. But without Her we are not strong. The vines on my skin are fading. The light in your eyes is going out. Without Her I feel us frail, stumbling, our power draining away from us like the water that stands in these empty halls.

We will have to leave this place. It’s crumbling all around us. I hear our sisters weeping as twilight falls. I am so afraid.

Where will we go? _Serkonos,_ I offer. Elsewhere. Any of the Isles. I kiss your fingertips to mark every location, every possibility. _We can dance in the streets of Karnaca. We can sing in the smoky taverns of Dabokva. We can run with the wolf packs in Wei-Ghon. We can gorge ourselves on salted meats in Wynnedown. We can even fly along the cliffs of Redmoor,_ and so what if we can't truly fly? My heart flies whenever I am with you, dear, and it will fly wherever I go as long as you are with me.

_Let's run away to far Pandyssia, darling, and lose ourselves among the forests and consort with heretics and bathe in the blood of their sacrifices. Let us be goddesses, capricious and cruel. Let us eat hearts freshly torn from chests, still beating and alive._

_Perhaps we don't need Her after all._ It's the only kind of sacrilege I'm capable of, supposing that, but perhaps we never did.

You're crying against me now. Your tears hot on my neck; I lick them off your cheeks, sweet and salt. _Hush, pet, hush._ But it's no use. These are all pretty lies. I would do anything for you—my shameful secret is that I would have died for you as gladly as I ever would have for Her. If I could have torn out my heart and thrown it onto Daud’s blade to spare you this pain, I swear I would have.

But I can't. I can't bring Her back, and I can't help you. I can't make this better.

I'm so sorry.

Only run away with me, my sister. Don't lie down and die now. Pick up these pieces and run with me, and perhaps we can still make something good between us. This place is ruined but that doesn't mean we must be.

Please say you will.

_Please._

~

You must understand that when they first arrived at the mansion, not all of them were pleased. It wasn't so green when they found it, not so lush, not so sprawling with uncontrolled, uncontained life. It was wet in the way of cold rain and it smelled like rotten age and mold, and the shadows were inhospitable even to creatures who made homes in shadows. All of them loved her who led them there, some of them feared her, the vast majority of them trusted her, but there were whispers of discontent, and here and there was doubt.

Did she know? Of course she knew. She heard every whisper. She saw into every sweetly poisonous heart. She never blamed them. _Only wait,_ she said to the ones who found the courage to speak those hearts to her. _Wait and see._

They did. And little by little, the mansion came to life.

Blood to water the vines. Ground flesh and bones to fertilize the flowerbeds. Screams to coax the leaves to unfurl, the cries of the powerful made fearful and lost as music to accompany a ladies’ tea. And with the pigments they mixed for her, she painted the future for them, showed them what would and what might be, and they reached for it and seized it and made it theirs.

Understand that nothing came easy to them. Understand that they fought for the world she showed them, that they had been fighting from the beginning. From fields and cowsheds, from back alleys and garrets, from receiving halls and ballrooms, all walls, all prisons, they clawed and beat and bit themselves free. Understand that for them, everything was a battle, and every single one was a victory.

Until him.

~

They ask _Did he kill her?_ And they look helplessly at each other and answer _We don't know._

_She's just gone._

~

One by one they drift away, like a dying tree shedding its leaves. The wind catches them up and carries them off, and they don't resist. Unlike leaves they're heavy with despair; they go with their shoulders slumped and their feet dragging. They go in singles and couples and trios but never more than that, because they're shattered and nothing is binding them together anymore.

Everything has fallen apart. The center has not held.

They thought they understood that the world bends, in all things, toward chaos. But they thought of chaos as a friend. They thought of entropy as something to be longed for. Now it's their enemy, an insult, a humiliation, and it's better to slink away from the ghost of everything they had than linger in the ruins and try to recover any pieces of it that they can.

Which they can't.

They remember. They can't forget. Everything they had, everything that might have been. A world for them to rule, an empire at their feet, and never again an instant of hateful weakness.

He stole it from them. And somehow the ultimate insult is that he left any of them alive.

But the last ones to leave whisper strange things to each other. They dare to imagine that it might not be over. They have the audacity to believe that world she showed them might not be out of reach. They hope.

The killer couldn't kill that. It's a poor victory, but possibly a victory nonetheless.

It might not be over, they whisper as they slip away to parts unknown. _We might not be finished. We can come back._

_We can live._

_We can win._


End file.
